Trump’s fake ‘national emergency’ to keep his promise

Donald Trump is a man of his word, and he promised his ‘‘base’’ to build a wall on the United States’ border with Mexico to stop an ‘‘invasion of gangs, invasion of drugs, invasion of people’’.

It turns out that Mexico isn’t willing to pay for it after all, but a promise is a promise. So he has declared a fake ‘‘national emergency’’ to get the money he needs.

It’s fake because the days when huge numbers of illegal immigrants were trying to come in across that 3200km border are long past. Fifteen years ago it was more than 1.5 million people a year. It had fallen to 400,000 by the middle of Barack Obama’s first term in 2010, and has not exceeded that number since.

Half of those 400,000 people are caught while crossing, so let’s just focus on the 200,000, more or less, whosneak through the border far from any legal crossing point, and whom a wall might stop. Let’s imagine that it could stop them all.

The predicted cost of the wall is $23 billion, so how much would the US be spending for each of these would-be border-crossers? Around $11,000 a person, and few of those people are gang members or drugsmugglers; they are just looking for work and a better life. The US is fully entitled to turn them all away, but this is ridiculous.

The wall is largely symbolic, but it is an important symbol for Trump.

It was one of the key promises he made to the true believers in his base, and it was striking how angry they got at him when it looked like he would be thwarted by Congress. As Ann Coulter said: ‘‘The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.’’

But the ‘‘national emergency’’ will probably do the trick for Trump.

It will face legal challenges, but the rules for declaring national emergencies are so vague and the precedents so numerous that he will probably win in the courts .

In the meantime, he will have about $8b to play with, mostly taken from the military and disaster-relief budgets.

It’s only a third of what it would take to build a full border wall, but it will let Trump look busy and persuade the base he is making progress.

So there’s one promise kept, more or less. The other two that really count are his promise to ‘‘bring the jobs back’’ and his commitment to outlaw abortion.

He can’t bring the jobs back because they never left. About 85 per cent of American manufacturing jobs lost since the turn of the century were killed by automation, not by free trade. But the fantasy statistics about near-full employment pumped out by the government may suffice to keep his base quiet, even if jobs are strangely scarce or low-paying around where they live.

What Trump does need to deliver on is banning abortion. He cannot do that himself, of course, but he promised to appoint ‘‘pro-life’’ justices to the Supreme Court during the 2016 election campaign.

He has probably managed to create an anti-abortion majority on the court by now, although you can never tell with judges. But there is a problem for him and the Republican Party if he delivers on that promise.

In 2016, 47 per cent of white women voted for Trump, but around half of them were not part of his base.

They were just traditional Republicans who voted as they always did.

If the Supreme Court reversed its historic 1973 Roe vs Wade decision that made abortion legal, a lot of these women would be cross with Trump and the Republican Party.

Given that Trump only won by a hair’s breadth in 2016, he cannot afford to lose their votes. Therefore, he definitely doesn’t need a big win on Roe vs Wade in 2019 if he wants to be re-elected in 2020.

Trump doesn’t care about the outcome on most issues, probably including this one. He just wants a ‘‘win’’, and he can conjure it up out of the most unpromising material.

If the judges make a few minor changes to the law, he will portray it as a triumph and drop the subject.

The real secret of dealing with Trump? Throw him a fish, and he will go away.

Thank heavens for the courage of our leaders. No, not those ones, although I’m certainly thankful for the courage of some of them too.

I mean those who started the movements that started changing our society for the better, who saw little sign that what they were doing was having an effect, but persevered anyway.

In my first few months in New Zealand I heard a talk by TV journalist Rob Harley, who had visited the notorious Robben Island, off Cape Town, and seen the cell where Nelson Mandela spent so much of his life.

On the floor, he recalled, was a pair of sandals, worn through at the heels. Mandela had worn the sandals through keeping himself in shape for a day he couldn’t even be sure would come, when he would be released.

Mandela could never have known how events would unfold, but as one of those at the sharp end of the struggle against apartheid, his focus remained strong. That’s leadership.

The best thing for me about the privilege of having a media platform is the way the interaction it promotes enables me to continue learning, and this week has been no different.

Last week’s column, about the framing of a report on a horrific rape case at Waihola, south of Dunedin, resonated in a way I simply hadn’t expected. Much of the reaction had me feeling decidedly emotional – which mirrored how I’d felt at times writing it – but a couple of things stayed with me beyond the emotional response.

At least two respondents on my Twitter feed – one a friend whose tireless charitable work I admire hugely, and the other an MP – suggested writing about the issue showed leadership. I was grateful for their kindness, and also a little embarrassed. I’d never thought of it that way. I just know I felt the subject deeply. I wrote angry in a way I seldom have.

But things have a remarkable way of coming together, almost serendipitously. Because also among the responses was a powerful lesson about leadership, and that, really, is how I arrived at this point.

A reader recommended a TED talk by American speaker Jackson Katz, who runs a programme called Mentors in Violence Prevention, working with the US military and numerous US sports franchises.

I’d really recommend you watch it, especially if you’re a man. The title is ‘‘Violence against women – it’s a men’s issue’’. He’s right, though I suspect the truth in the title will be news to more men than women.

But it was something he said at the start that grabbed me right out of the gate.

‘‘It’s important that we acknowledge,’’ he said, ‘‘that the growing movement of men … who are standing up and speaking out about men’s violence against women … is indebted to the leadership of women. On every level women built these movements …

I thought of names like Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, many prominent Maori leaders of history whose names I’m embarrassed not to know but really need to learn, and the leaders still taking lonely stands on new frontiers, of race, gender, sexual orientation.

I considered how easily I might simply have carried on watching, oblivious, thinking there was ‘‘nothing to see here’’ when Scott Kuggeleijn, acquitted of rape in 2017, was picked in the Black Caps recently. How the friend who called ME a leader was one of the first I saw publicly voice her concerns. How colleagues Michelle Duff and Alison Mau have taken on the subject in print, knowing abuse is a fait acompli. How the Black Caps’ most vocal fan, Michelle Langstone, took the heart-breaking step of saying she would not watch her beloved national cricket team again until New Zealand Cricket had publicly addressed the issue. How without their courageous leadership, and persistence, I may not have been aware enough to take the same stand Michelle has.

And let’s be honest; because of the warped way our society is still structured, I’ll never face the same degree of abuse they know will come their way in response.

I have far less reason than they do to fear putting my head above the parapet.

I thought about how, in the past, I might have let stories like the one I reframed last week slip by without realising how damaging and demoralising it could be to every woman who read it. I’ve heard from a lot more women since, and it’s made me realise how much more courageous, and switched on, I should have been.

Yes, thank heavens for our courageous leaders. I dread to think where our society would be without them.